I have an Alix appliance with 256 MB memory. Added an 8 GB cf card and upgraded the firmware. I just wanted to take stock of how far I have come with this little power sipper and pfSense in a short few days since the book came out. I have: a. setup DNS forwarding and my LAN machines are now happy b. setup OpenDNS connectivity c. prioritized my Vonage VOIP connection d. implemented egress filtering - did not know such a thing existed and have subsequently found a screaming mac on my network (UDP port 137 NetBIOS) e. implemented OpenVPN - the setup was not a breeze but a heck of a lot easier than winging it off the net
I just have to sit back, take a deep breath and thank the folks who brought us this functionality and put the book together. I've read most of it three times over and can say that I am impressed. I have had the Alix box sitting on a shelf for over a year and thought I'd never actually put it to use. Until the book came out. It is written clearly and covers the stuff I need. For example, I was thinking of getting a wifi card for the small box and reading the book clearly veered me in the direction of staying with an external wifi box to make the setup more robust and debug-able. I have actually invested many hours learning the pfsense environment - I can see using it in an enterprise environment on a real server. The more I work with it , the more I like it and have to say -- this is a beautiful thing. Mehma